Smash TV: Fridays on CBS?

About fourteen years ago, my mother's friends threw birthday parties for their children at Discovery Zone locations in Miami.  Among the many video games available there, I came across an interesting one.  It involved guns, it involved death, it involved big money, and it involved big prizes.  It involved everything a second-grader in the mid 1990s cannot get today.  I loved it. 

Courtesy of Arcade-History.com
TOTAL CARNAGE: I LOVE IT!

In the fashion of Robotron 2084, Eugene Jarvis and his boys between Midway and Williams Electronics constructed a game with such epic carnage in the year 1990.  They called the game Smash TV.  In a backstory is said to be similar to The Running Man, up to two lucky contestants get a chance to fight their way through hordes of enemies in closed arenas for cash and prizes.  The contestant has an assortment of power weapons:  automatic shotguns, machine guns, grenade launchers, missile launchers, and even force fields.

After you clear a certain amount of arenas to get to the end, there are big boss battles to clear; Mutoid Man, Scar Face, the Die Cobras, and the host himself.  Power weapons as specified above, including the boss-exclusive bazooka, are the only things that can damage them.  Also, to add some incentive to your quest, you can collect as many as ten keys to allow entrance to the secret "Pleasure Dome" bonus stage.

From my experience playing the game, the game does okay for a casual arcade game.  You use one joystick to move and use the other to shoot like in Robotron.  The carnage gets pretty hectic, more diverse, and more voluminous as you progress in the game, allowing for otherwise long and hard levels (I'd buy that for a dollar...or two).  Sometimes, it gets so hectic that you need to find as many power weapons as you can just to keep a clear corner, but you may only stay alive long enough to remove the major enemies.  If anything, if you like Geometry Wars, Smash TV goes down in my book as a good arcade game for the fact that it has a good gameplay mechanic and an otherwise challenging difficulty, especially for those who also like Michael Bay explosions everywhere.